The Wrong Place

It occurred to me some time ago that among many of my art and academic friends, the success and viability of one's work is now measured in proportion to the accumulation of frequent flyer miles. The more we travel for work, the more we are called upon to provide institutions in other parts of the country and the world with our presence and services; the more we give into the logic of nomadism, one could say, as pressured by a mobilized capitalist economy, the more we are made to feel wanted, needed, validated, and relevant. It seems our very sense of self-worth is predicated more and more on our suffering through the inconveniences and psychic destabilizations of ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traversing through elsewheres. Whether we enjoy it or not, we are culturally and economically rewarded for enduring the "wrong" place. It seems we're out of place all too often.

But what is a "wrong" place? How does one recognize it as such, as opposed to a "right" place? What do we really mean by these qualifying adjectives? Is being in the wrong place the same thing as being out of place? And what are the effects of such mis/displacements for art, subjectivity, and locational identities? In light of the intensified mobilization of bodies, information, images, and commodities on the one hand, and the greater and greater homogenization and standardization of places on the other (which, by the way, facilitates the smooth, unimpeded mobilization and circulation of these bodies, information, images, and commodities), I continue to wonder about the impact, both positive and negative, of the spatial and temporal experiences that such conditions engender not only in terms of cultural practice but more basically for our psyches, our sense of self, our sense of well-being, our sense of belonging to a place and a culture.

Within the limited critical discussions concerning present-day site-oriented art, one tendency has been to valorize the nomadic condition. Referencing the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as theoretical support, some critics have championed the work of artists such as Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, Renee Green, and Christian Philipp Muller, among many others, for having abandoned the phenomenologically oriented mode of site-specific art (best exemplified by Richard Serra's sculptures). This is a mode that is seen to be outdated now. Moving beyond the inherited conception of site-specific art as a grounded, fixed (even if ephemeral), singular event, the works of these artists are seen to advance an altogether different notion of a site as predominantly an intertextually coordinated, multiply located, discursive field of operation. [1]

This is the reading, for example, of the art historian and critic James Meyer, who has coined the term "functional site" to distinguish recent site-oriented practices from those of the past. [2] This conceptual shift has embraced the idea of meaning as an open, unfixed constellation, porous to contingencies -- an idea that most of us accept and welcome. But in the process, the idea of the fluidity of meaning has tended to get conflated/confused with the idea of the fluidity of identities and subjectivities, even physical bodies, to such an extent that a certain romanticism has accrued to the image of a cultural worker on the go. It is not only the artwork that is not bound to the physical conditions of a place anymore, it is the artist-subject who is "liberated" from any enduring ties to local circumstances. Qualities of permanence, continuity, certainty, groundedness (physical and otherwise) are thought to be artistically retrograde, thus politically suspect, in this context. By contrast, qualities of uncer tainty, instability, ambiguity, and impermanence are taken as desired attributes of a vanguard, politically progressive, artistic practice. But I remain unconvinced of the ways in which a model of meaning and interpretation is called forth to validate, even romanticize, the material and socioeconomic realities of an itinerant lifestyle. I am suspicious of this analogical transposition and the seductive allure of nomadism it supports if for no other reason than for the fact of my own personal ambivalence toward the physical and psychical experiences of mobilization and destabilization that such nomadism demands.

At the same time, however, I remain wary of the more prevalent position, the antinomadic and antitechnology argument, like that proposed by the art historian Lucy Lippard. In her book The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, she presents a holistic vision of place as a kind of text of humanity, "the intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology" that is understood as such from the position of being an "insider." Place is, according to Lippard, "a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar[ldots] 'the external world mediated through human subjective experience."' [3]